17 Jun 2026, Wed

Oracle’s Record Quarter Is Only the Beginning

Most investors think of Oracle as a legacy database company that got lucky with a cloud pivot. That framing is out of date — and the gap between perception and reality may be exactly where the opportunity lives.

On June 10, Oracle reported its Q4 and full fiscal year 2026 results. The numbers weren’t just good. They were generational.

What the tape just said

Q4 revenue hit $19.2 billion, up 21% year over year. Cloud infrastructure revenue — the real engine here — surged 93% in the quarter alone. For the full fiscal year, total cloud revenue reached $34 billion, up 39%. Net income came in at $17 billion for FY2026, a 37% jump from the prior year, with profit margins expanding to 25%.

The number that stopped analysts cold: Remaining Performance Obligations — Oracle’s contracted future revenue — grew from $553 billion in Q3 to $638 billion in Q4. That’s a 363% year-over-year increase. In one quarter, RPO grew by $85 billion. That kind of demand signal is nearly unprecedented for an enterprise software company of this scale.

Slight tangent, but it matters — Oracle isn’t just riding the AI wave. It’s becoming the foundation beneath it. OpenAI, Meta, and NVIDIA have all signed large cloud infrastructure contracts with Oracle’s OCI platform. The company is now one of the fastest-growing providers of AI data center capacity globally, and it’s doing it with clean energy infrastructure built on natural gas fuel cells.

For fiscal year 2027, Oracle has confirmed revenue guidance of $90 billion — up from $67.4 billion this year. Non-GAAP EPS guidance was raised to $8.05. Revenue is forecast to grow roughly 25% annually over the next three years, outpacing the broader software industry’s 17% average.

The part most investors are skipping

Yes, Oracle carries over $100 billion in long-term debt and is running negative free cash flow due to its $50 billion capex commitment for data center construction. That’s real risk, and it’s worth watching. The bears have a point — the backlog has to convert into recognized revenue, and that process takes time.

But TD Cowen has a $300 price target on ORCL. BofA holds a Buy with a $240 target. Multiple analysts raised their targets just before the Q4 print, with consensus sitting at a moderate Buy. Analyst-derived fair value estimates have moved toward $368.

What’s interesting is that ORCL is still trading roughly 40% below its September 2025 peaks despite delivering its strongest organic growth in 15 years. That divergence between results and stock price is either a trap — or the setup.

The AI infrastructure buildout isn’t slowing. Four of the Magnificent 7 committed $650 billion in AI capex for 2026, a 71% year-over-year increase. Oracle sits directly in the path of that capital. Whether the stock has fully priced in the backlog conversion is the debate worth having. Full breakdown of Oracle’s Q4 filing here.